Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: i wish

  • unAustralian Day

    The aspects of Australianness I feel most dearly attached to, and which are also the aspects Germans, Americans, other people seem most intensely curious to hear reports of whenever I’m travel outside Australia, are these:

    1. the land (the shape of the land, like an upside-down heart); the surf, the rock formations, the desert, the landscapes.

    2. the creatures we tyrannize and extinguish and who seem to threaten us

    3. the peoples whose cultures, whose survival and quietude makes them an irresistible secret, beloved of every thinking person, a guide to what we are generally doing wrong and where we might go right

    Survival Day: a clue to the changes we are making too slowly to survive, all of us, aboard our beloved earth. Unfold the new flag, raise up our fresher songs, institute a Council of Advisory Elders to put a check on our Parliaments. I want government by tribal elders and old women. I want pride and humility to be our standards.

    [-O-]

  • frauenpower

    Tiny revolutions in other people’s lives, I just can’t stop making them. When we got here and had eaten our first meal together I said to our hostess, No, I’ll wash up. Because as everybody knows, it’s not on for the person who cooks to wash up as well. I made sure to say it loudly and clearly in front of her husband and all her grown children, but got mere glassy looks in exchange. “Cathoel is very industrious,” she noted, approvingly, later, to her son. Christmas morning I made the only grandchild thank her after she’d been brought a cup of cocoa when everyone else was drinking coffee. She decided she’d like some once her grandmother had already sat down, and without hesitation the grandmother left her own breakfast untouched and got up again.

    I couldn’t bear to see how everybody sat down at the long, laden table and started saying, “Some jam would be nice,” and then when she had already returned from fetching it, “Oh, you know what? Let’s have some dark bread as well.” Tonight my partner cooked and I washed up. Afterwards we played cards, just him and his mum and his dad and me. The father got up and got beers. As I got up to go to the kettle I announced, “And I’ll take a cup of tea… does anybody else want a cup of tea?” With slight embarrassment my partner corrected my German: “No, Cathoel, in this case you say ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea.’ ‘I’ll take a cup of tea’ is for when you’re expecting a waitress to bring it to you.” “Yes,” I said, primly, “I was making a joke. Because I’ve noticed in this household people just sit there and say, I’ll take a cup of tea, and then your mother instantly gets up and goes into the kitchen.” His mother began to laugh. I’ve never seen her laugh so heartily. She slapped herself across the knees. “Thank you! Thank you!” Her cards spilled and she picked them up and began tucking them back into a handful, wiping away tears. We played on and I drank my tea and they drank their giant beers, and in the end it turned out the two men had trailed behind and the winners, bringing home exactly the same number of points each, were the two of us. “Sieg der Frauen!” I said, victory of the women. “Frauenpower,” she said, and we shook hands diagonally across the table.

  • Martin Place

    How convenient for our struggling Government that a lone imbecile equipped with a gun has showed up in a Sydney cafe at last. It was beginning to seem no one would bother answering their call. Now perhaps we’ll all fall back into line & stop whining about petty distractions such as racial hatred and climate chaos.

    What is the difference between this guy and all the other guys who have held hostages at bay during a siege while they demanded the negotiation of a team of experts? Why is this the one we call “terrorism”? Is it just because the guy falsely claims Moslim beliefs to justify his narcissistic violence? Is it because maybe his ancestors weren’t all Northern European? Is it just because he got himself a banner printed? If IS or Al Qaeda are so influential they can plant well-organised agents on “our” soil (one’s language inevitably waxes purple) wouldn’t they be able to do better than a solitary weapon and sole unbalanced operator? Speaking of which, is our Prime Minister actually visibly grinning at the moment?

    I think in the ways we report and digest this event Australia’s media and media consumers can have the grace to want the safe & soon release of the people trapped in the Lindt cafe without rushing to offer ourselves and our hysteria to the service of disruptive cruelty.

  • an apple tree with one of its seeds

    So cold and empty at the heart today. I feel all the little threads connecting me to everyday life in the usual world – the usual world of Brisbane, that I grew so painfully and slowly reattached to after some 13 years away – have been cut, or burnt off and I am gliding in tiny jerks across an endless sky of winter, white sky, moored in this tiny white room, which sits five floors up and blank-eyed with windows, looking out on all the whiteness as though they were just another wall. I went for an early morning walk with a man and his dog, I chatted for over an hour with a friend who makes music in New York, the day started out clean and entire and I had been thinking how the jetlag was passing off and the climate shock was gone. But today was overcastled, grimy, grey, people walking stoopingly. My old winter boots that I’d left behind so gladly in Berlin when we flew south had little leaks in their soles which I had forgotten, the streets seemed to me endlessly stony and the only green things have cast off their veil of leaves and stand trembling naked, black and greasy with rain. By the side of the canal we found a giant apple tree leafless and bare studded with large red apples gleaming slightly, like lamps. A couple of apples had fallen from its black branches but they had not fallen very far. Apples don’t. The flights of stairs home seemed endless and I peeled off my shoddy boots and climbed back onto the island of bed, white bed in a white room adrift in a white sky, and lay disconsolately fingering my hair, feeling its wiry wintry dryness, fingertips stumbling over the wretched knots like berries in the snow.

  • grafitti cake & cold wind

    Walking past yet another housing estate whose walls are festooned to arm’s length with torn posters, glued art, endless tags. A small, modest sign up top reads: Nothing is to be stuck on here. “Nothing is to be stuck on here! Yeah… so I see.” “Yes… it’s hopeless.” “No, no. I think it’s absolutely hopeful. Beautifully so.” We walk past another building which reads, in part, Love is not a private possession. We wait for the dog, who is snuffling round a tree trunk with great assiduity. How does he know how to measure out his urine so as to have a little to offer every staging post and chat point, but without finding himself trapped back in the apartment all night with a half-full bladder. “I guess every young man has to have his tag. And then he has to stop on every corner to pee a little bit and mark it out.” “Just imagine if every young man had his favourite plant. And everywhere he went, he just had to plant out some of those plants, to make his mark on the place.” “Place sure would be green.”

  • alles ganz frisch

    No Murdoch press and the sun has come out! How much fresher can Germany get. We have eaten a breakfast of thinly sliced things rolled on platters served with other, slightly more thickly sliced dark and chewy breads. My companion sinks into his first cup of filter coffee with condensed milk, “Aaahhh.” The familiar is sweet. He makes me smell its unmistakeable scent but I hand it back, unimpressed: “That is not the coffee to make me forget my vow.”

    Instead of The Australian and The Courier-Mail, with their perpetual racist beat-ups and photos of women murdered by their husbands who are described invariably as “decent blokes” who simply “got pushed too far” (by the serially battered victim, presumably), instead of a cover photo of some actor who happens to have dark hair and “swarthy” skin staged in an “ISIS” pose like some deranged hip hop artist, there are four pages of literature and art events with listings – in the plural – each day of readings and book signings. Some are in bookshops I recognise, one is in the genteelly decaying place round the corner where in the week I was first in Berlin alone I took my own book and asked would they sell it. They did. Its sole purchaser was a tall beautiful man whom I approached as he was turning over novels in the English language section, saying, “You should read this one, I wrote it.” “Alright,” he said, and bought it. That man was a bookshop and cafe owner in gorgeous Copenhagen and is now one of my dearest friends. He told me, before I ever thought to visit, his little shop sells “three of my favourite things – coffee, books, and records.”

    Much though I applaud the ferocious independence and gall of the newly established Saturday Paper back home, it feels wonderfully civilized to have a wide choice of newspapers all run by different owners and all presenting a variety of views. The Tagesspiegel, “mirror of the day”, has a long, two-page article titled “Wie Besser Helfen.” How you can better help: it details the “lonely elderly neighbour,” the “fallen person selling Motz” (a homelessness fundraiser similar to the Big Issue), the “prostituted girl”, and the “belaestigtes Maedchen” – I don’t know the word and wonder what kind of needing-help girl this could be: my partner, in labouring to describe it to me, reveals that he has heard the recently much-used word “cat-calling” as “scat-calling.” I want to go out into the streets of Berlin and feel the frigid sun on my face and get scat-called by traffic that stops and starts like a jazz composition on the right-hand side of the road. I want never to hear the name Rupert Murdoch or Tony Abbott again. I read the stories of “alcoholic apprentices” and lonely elderly neighbours, followed by short, pragmatic paragraphs contributed by people who know how best to offer help – social workers, for example – and I think how a country’s press can shape its social life. My partner reads out an article on an American novelist we met at the University of Queensland, who dropped his head when I asked a question from the audience and tore in a deep breath when I mentioned how Australia, “to our shame, leads the world in child suicide rates among Indigenous young people.” Last night we passed a synagogue with a police officer standing outside stamping in the cold, he had a little hut with Polizei written on it. Every Jewish gathering place in Germany is thus guarded, my partner says, and has been since 1949, “because we are guilty for a thousand years.” I suggest to him that there have been times when a German police guard would, to a Jew, not be very comforting. Like the escort offered in my homeland to its Indigenous people whenever they are picked up for not paying a fine, or for being drunk: a one-way train that leads to nowhere but the ironic and ferocious hell whose gates are tiled with good and insufferably pious intentions. The Murderochracy.

  • crop of the air

    I got up in the middle of the night and went over to the window. It wasn’t the middle of the night, it was half-past five in the afternoon, I had slept from nine til five because right now sleep is my job. You can’t tell because it’s dark already, but not quite. It never gets quite dark, there is always as I noticed in England years before this the glow on the horizon of the next town; the lights infect the dark and it feels like it’s mutual, in wintertime it never gets quite fully light, really, either.

    Half-awake I scrabbled at the curtains a bit. He said: What are you doing? I fell back. I said: I thought I should get up and close these curtains properly, I thought, in the morning a bright shaft of light is going to come through that gap and wake me up. But I realised I was wrong. Mm, he said, it won’t get light til late, maybe 8 o’clock. And, I said, it’s not going to get bright at all. No, he said ruefully, and we went back down into the chambers of sleep, the lost city of all those who are dead to the world.

    A lit sign at Abu Dhabi airport said, Last Chance to Buy. To me this had a kind of ectopian ring, if ectopia can be the reverse of utopian. Beside the sign were many golden products ranked in serried rows. Bottles of perfume, bottles of booze. Last year when I was there they had an aqua-coloured lightbox showing the wistful face of a child gazing out of her window and the text said, At any one moment there are 450,000 people in the air. That image of the city of souls who have left the earth yet plan to return, and the image jetlag plants in me of half the world sleeping in their bed-tombs under the water, as the sun splashes its giant curves up and down the round walls of Earth and drags them on, made me think again about how air travel feels like being away at sea. I guess it doesn’t last as long. But the feeling of being returned safely to dry ground is just as dull and amazing, just as blessed. The dangers are the same: you could fall overboard and be eaten, you are out of your element, you could drown. I suppose you really wouldn’t get eaten in midair but you could drown in the air, gasping for ground like a fish drawn against its fire of will onto the deck, you would fall and keep falling and take many miles to die.

  • state of sunshone

    Queensland. The Sunshine State. Skin Cancer Capital of the World. Spending as much time in the hammock under the trees as I can possibly afford, trying to absorb enough warmth and light and birdsong to slingshot me over the sudden cliff face of winter. A friend writes from Berlin: it is near zero. And I read this in all kinds of symbolist ways. Meanwhile another friend over there has made a grim art project: photos of Berlin skies and of London, side by side: who has the most sunlight? In Berlin they measure the hours of sunshine, in winter, and announce it as part of the weather report: when I was living there, in January there were 22 hours of sunshine for the month. That’s right, the month. We didn’t crawl into Spring until early May, at which time I spoke to my Mum on the phone. “It’s 20 degrees!” I told her, excitedly. I had had to go buy new, lighter socks and scour the second hand shops for a t-shirt. “Oh, I know,” said Mum, “it’s only been 21 here. We’ve had the heater on.”

    How I pored over the Queensland complaints sprouting all over Facebook. “Ooh it’s chilly!” “Had to wear my cardigan on the bus to work this morning.” How I longed to move back and become one of those Queenslanders who complains when they have to put socks on. How I quail before the bellowing fire in my lungs that comes of walking on the stone streets of an iron nation steeping in ice for three-quarters of the year.

  • storm

    I just cycled home through the spattering rain, with thunder rolling heavy overneath, and as I swept down the hill riding on my brakes I passed a cluster of dark-clad people raising their umbrellas, phones to their ears, released from their desks for the day and not happy. They were large but looked not so much fat as spilled, a kind of liquid inactivity none of us had two decades back and now even swimsuit models can’t avoid. They looked as though the world had offered them poor options and their lives were dragged by addiction and stimulants and their day jobs were dull and dispiriting. Flowers of colour in the form of bright umbrellas struck me as indications of courage. And I thought about how with all our beautiful ingenuity we have failed ourselves, and how we’ve birthed the first generation of babies in human history who are likely to live shorter lives than their parents. Along the backs of the houses and light industrial sheds the river, muddy and sludgy and odorous between the prickling mangroves, lazed brimming with its greenish life and drawing down to the sea and back again all its clean secrets. I need a better life. I need more time on my feet. I want to live in a happier world. I want to get away from my screen and all the screens in waiting rooms and bus stations and fuel stops and public spaces and gather all the home going commuters for a game of touch footy in the sweeping black rain.

  • collective noun a couch of potatoes

    I have no depth and everything within me is shallow and small. I waste this only thing time. I spend it as a charity on stultifying trivialities all pettifogging at the window’s pain like untrue love. I show off and on again. I’ve nothing. Not even that nothing. Only what is left by boiling too many bones too long: mostly, scum and smell and the evaporation of beauty; mostly, strong dark waters no one would drink, but for their health.

    I sit here, boiling far too many suns. But only as they fall across the water, winglike, saving daylight. Using words like jewels to deflect my nakedness and shame. A continual dinning sound like tinnitus, bling! bling! bling! Body fat and gemstones, a clattering cup’s old soup. Using time like words which can be flattened silent to the page. A couch of potatoes. A combine of harvests. A chapel of waysides. A nun of that.